“No.” Somehow the duke’s hand shot up and he gripped her with surprising strength—perhaps his last strength. “You send for no one, d’you hear me, Séraphine? No one.”
“But you’re ill.”
He opened his eyes and she gasped. Blood vessels had burst in both his eyes, making them look as if they were bleeding. “I’ve been poisoned.”
He coughed and began heaving and she realized that he hadn’t the strength to raise himself.
“Bring a basin, Mehmed.”
She gripped his shoulders and with great effort turned him so he was over the basin Mehmed held. Though all he brought up was a terrible greenish-brown bile. When he was done he lay back, gasping for breath, his eyes once again closed.
“Listen to me, Séraphine. My enemies have poisoned me. I cannot trust anyone. Let no one in. Just you and Mehmed.”
She was already shaking her head. “If you’re poisoned, even more reason to send for a doctor.” She met Mehmed’s gaze. The boy’s eyes were wide and scared. She probably looked much the same. “We can’t nurse you alone. You’ll die, Your Grace.”
“Val.”
She blinked. Was he delirious? “What?”
He opened those ghastly bloody eyes again and smiled with cracked lips, a parody of his usual beautiful smile. “If I’m to die, then I’d like the last person to tend me to address me by my given name. Call me Val.”
She threw up her hands. “You’re insane!”
“Yes.” He closed his eyes again. “But not so mad as to allow my murderers into my bedchambers. Promise me, Séraphine.”
“Dear God.”
He opened his eyes again, simply looking at her. “Promise me on your chatelaine, Séraphine.”
She pressed her lips together. “Very well. I promise you on my chatelaine that I won’t let any other but Mehmed in here.”
He nodded, then rolled his eyes to the boy and spoke in what was presumably the boy’s native tongue. The boy replied with tears in his eyes.
“Good.” The duke closed his eyes. “I apologize. For… the condition of…” She waited, but the next sound from his lips was a rather concerning rattling snore.
Bridget straightened, staring down at the duke. The panic was rising again. He looked so frail, lying there, and he’d put her and a teenage boy entirely in charge of his welfare.
If he died, she might very well be charged with the murder of a duke. She might be hanged.
No.
No, she wouldn’t think of that.
Right now she would think of how she was going to make the duke better.
Bridget straightened, smoothing her skirts.
She carefully pulled the coverlet over the duke. Pip jumped on the bed and settled against the sick man’s side. She debated shooing the dog off—she doubted very much that the duke would want him there—but Pip might provide needed warmth.
She said, “Mehmed, please go to the kitchens and bring up a hot pitcher of water and some cloths. If anyone asks, you’re simply bringing the things for His Grace’s usual shave, nothing more. We won’t, of course, be mentioning his illness.” She looked at the boy. “To anyone.”
Mehmed nodded vigorously and was out the door.
Bridget crossed the room to lock the door behind him.
Then she went to fireplace and stirred the ashes. There was a faint glow still. A bowl on the mantel held a few paper twists and she took a couple and lit them. As they flamed she added coals until she’d built a nice fire and the room began to heat.
She stood and looked around.
The room was a shambles. She could almost see what had happened in the early hours of this morning. The duke must’ve returned, perhaps already feeling ill. Here he had shed his coat and waistcoat, dropping them to the floor. There he’d first been ill, violently, before he could reach a pot. Here he’d staggered and overturned a chair and been ill again. One shoe was by the fire, the other… completely missing, as far as she could see. An overturned pitcher and damp carpet bespoke either thirst or an attempt at washing.
He’d been in extremis, suffering, and had never summoned aid.
I cannot trust anyone.
She gazed at his sleeping form for a moment in wonder. He truly couldn’t, could he?
If Mehmed hadn’t come to her, if she hadn’t opened the door, he would have suffered and perhaps died alone without once calling for help.
She’d never known anyone so alone.
Anyone so lonely.
Bridget shook herself. Now wasn’t the time for morbid thoughts.
She began by opening the windows just a crack. She knew that cold air was bad for the ill, but frankly she couldn’t stand the stench of the room. The fresh air seemed to help a little and she started righting the furniture.
A gentle scrape at the door heralded Mehmed’s return.
Between the two of them, they stripped the duke and sponged him clean as best they could.
Even in this he couldn’t be polite and remain unconscious and instead woke at the most inopportune moment, when she was pressing a cloth to his lower belly.
“Oh, Séraphine,” he rasped. “Are you making advances?”
“I’m wiping vomit and sweat from your body,” she said with rather too much tartness. “Nothing more.”
“Are you… sure?” And she thought she saw his lips twitch as if they tried for his usual smile.
She blinked hard. “Yes. This isn’t a moment for flirtation, Your Grace.”
“… always a moment for flirtation,” he whispered, the beginning of his sentence too low to understand. “Especially… when you’re handling my cock.”
“That’s Mehmed.”
“Pity. Though he has very soft hands.”
“Humph.”
“Have I offended your delicate… sensibilities?” He wheezed a laugh and then began hacking, unable to stop—or so it appeared.
Bridget threw down her cloth and helped him, still coughing and choking, to sit up.
“Water,” he managed to gasp.
She reached for a glass sitting on the table beside his bed and then paused, staring at it. The glass had been there, half-full, when they’d entered the room.
She turned to Mehmed. “Is there any more water in the pitcher you brought up?”
“Yes, a little,” the boy said, hurrying away to fetch it.
“Smart lass,” the duke whispered. His eyes were half-closed and there were two spots of bright red in his cheeks.
Mehmed came back with the pitcher. “What shall he drink the water from?”
“Just hold the pitcher to his lips.”
The duke swallowed twice slowly and she took the pitcher away from his mouth, watching him.
He leaned over and vomited the water back up into her lap.
“Sorry,” he managed to say.
And then he began convulsing.
Will you use your right hand like a proper boy should? asked the Masked Duke and Val tried and tried, but the quill was too big and his hand hurt and so the Masked Duke took Pretty and squeezed her neck until Pretty hung limp, her green eyes half-closed. This is what happens when you disobey my rules said the Masked Duke.
Val was five.
“… tea, it’s only beef tea,” said burning Séraphine, her voice too loud, her eyes too bright, her hands painfully hard. “Can you drink some? Please, please, please, can you drink some, Your Grace?”
“Call me Val, if I’m to die,” he replied, or thought he did, but then Séraphine was lost to murmurs and howls.
Only peasants and abnormals use their left hands declared the Masked Duke. Val held the quill but it skittered across the paper and made strange squiggles. The Masked Duke took Marmalade—soft, fluffy Marmalade—and Val wept and wept. But still the duke wrung her neck until she hung broken. This is what happens when you disobey my rules said the Masked Duke.
Val was seven.
“She’s your sister, surely you can’t believe your sister is one of your enemies,�
�� Séraphine argued, her voice hoarse as if she’d been arguing for days. Perhaps she had.
“No one,” he said. Eve, gentle pure Eve who hated him now. “No one.”
He opened his eyes and for a moment thought he’d gone blind. Then he turned his head and realized it was night. The fire was ablaze on the other side of the room. He stared at it. Such a huge blaze, overrunning the hearth, licking up the mantel, skipping over the carpet.
“I’m going to hell.”
The flames blew suddenly high and hot, right into his face, and then he was ablaze, too.
You’ll learn if I have to kill everything you love said the Masked Duke. Val drew very, very carefully, his hand steady, his quill upright. And still a drop of ink blotted the paper. The Masked Duke took Opal and snapped her neck and she was limp and dead, her white-and-black body swaying gently. Just like all the others. This is what happens when you disobey my rules said the Masked Duke.
Val was nine.
“Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.” The whisper was soft and thready, and yet clearly audible in the otherwise quiet room.
Well, he was obviously dreaming now—or already dead—for no one prayed for him, not even burning Séraphine. That would be a sacrilege of terrible proportions. He tried to smile at the thought, but no muscle moved.
Ah, death, come at last.
He might very well welcome it if it weren’t for…
The Masked Duke’s boots sounded in the hall. Val continued to write out his lesson—right-handed, perfect, and in Latin. The footfalls stopped. Val set down his quill and gently blew upon his paper. What is this the Masked Duke asked. Val glanced up. The gray striped body swayed gently from a hook on the wall. Tiger he said and smiled at the Masked Duke. Fuck your rules, Father.
Val was eleven.
THE HANGING MAN wasn’t nearly as nice an alehouse as the White Hare, but then Hugh’s informant wasn’t a young boy like Alf.
Not that Alf had turned out to be quite as young—or as innocent—as Hugh had first thought him.
Hugh sat in a dark corner, his back against the wall so that there’d be no surprises. The alehouse had only a few customers at this time of day—not yet five of the clock. Four soldiers gambled by the fire, while a solitary drinker hunched over a small cup of gin. On another bench a man in ragged clothing was snoring, either a regular or a beggar the barmaid had let in to sleep out of pity.
The barmaid herself sat behind a simple board propped on two chairs, her wares in back of her on a shelf. She seemed occupied at present with picking nits from her head and crushing them between her fingernails.
Hugh sipped his beer, a near-tasteless brew he suspected was watered, and let his head lean against the wall behind him, watching the room from beneath his tricorne.
He yawned widely, blinking. Peter had had another of his nightmares last night and waked crying for his dead mother. He’d been inconsolable, a red, weeping child who wasn’t much more than a baby, really, only four and a half. He’d pushed Hugh away, hit the nurse, and seemed only a little comforted by his half-asleep elder brother, aged all of seven.
Hugh had spent the rest of the night watching his sons sleeping, curled together like abandoned puppies. He’d commanded armies and masterminded political intrigue, yet he was helpless in the face of his children’s grief.
The outer door opened and a man in a battered wide-brimmed hat entered, his head ducked low, his shoulders hunched. The newcomer glanced quickly around, then descended the steps into the basement alehouse. He spoke to the barmaid and obtained from her a small tin cup of gin before crossing to Hugh.
“Took me near an hour to get here,” Calvin Cartwright said as he sat. “Why the bloody hell did you choose a meeting place so far away?”
Hugh eyed the nervous way his informant was tapping his fingernails against his tin cup. “You said you didn’t want to be recognized.”
“And so I don’t.” Cartwright took a gulp of his gin. He was a handsome man, his features classically even and entirely forgettable. He was a footman in the Duke of Montgomery’s employ and more than happy to report on his master for money.
So happy, in fact, that his enthusiasm gave Hugh pause. In his experience most servants were contemptuous to one degree or another of their employers—they lived, after all, cheek by jowl with them. Few, however, actively loathed the person who gave them roof, sustenance, and wage.
From his first contact with Cartwright, however, it had been apparent that the footman was such a man.
Which left the question: Why? Montgomery might be a blackmailer and an all-around rogue, but he paid his servants rather well. Besides Cartwright, Hugh had been able to bribe only the unfortunate ham-handed footman caught rifling the duke’s desk.
“Well?” Cartwright demanded now. “Have you the purse?”
“Yes,” Hugh said calmly. “But I need your report first.”
Cartwright snorted. “The report is everything’s gone to bloody hell.” He took another gulp of his gin. “Montgomery’s been poisoned.”
Hugh stilled. “What?”
The footman grinned rather nastily. “Night of the ball. Took real sick. Won’t let none but the housekeeper and that foreign boy in his rooms ever since.”
Hugh narrowed his eyes at the handsome face across from him and decided he really didn’t care much for Cartwright. The ball had been two nights before. If Montgomery had really been poisoned… “How do you know it wasn’t overindulgence in food or drink or simply a bad meal that—”
But the footman was shaking his head. He leaned forward. “Poison. In his wine—or so I heard.” For a moment he looked downright scared.
“Whom did you hear this from?”
Cartwright gulped the rest of his gin and started to stand. “I need that money.”
Hugh hooked his foot around the other man’s chair and pulled it back to the table, forcing him to sit back down. “Then you’ll stay and answer my questions.”
Hugh stared hard at the other man until Cartwright nodded grudgingly and relaxed.
“Is Montgomery still alive?” Hugh asked.
That got a twisted smile. “He’s the Devil. Took that poison, swallowed it down, and still lives… for now, anyway.”
“You’re sure?” Hugh pressed. “You’ve seen him?”
“I haven’t seen him,” the footman said, “but I’ve heard him. Muttering away in his rooms. And that housekeeper and the boy going in and out, bringing him food and drink. Oh, he’s alive all right. Doubt anything could kill him.”
That was superstitious nonsense so Hugh disregarded it. “Who could’ve poisoned him?” he mused aloud.
Cartwright barked a laugh at that. “Anyone. He’s the most hated man in London. You should see the people come begging for mercy from him. Highborn and low-. And he never shows them none. Never.”
“You’re talking about people who want him dead,” Hugh said. “I speak of people who had the opportunity to poison him—a different thing entirely.”
The footman’s gaze slid sideways. “There were hundreds at that ball. Talk about opportunities. Hundreds. Could have been anyone. Anyone.”
“Hmm.” Hugh watched the man—his nervous, tapping fingers, his eyes unable to meet Hugh’s own. Had someone else employed Cal to poison Montgomery? Who? And why? “You’ve never told me why you hate the duke so.”
The fingers stilled for a moment and Cal’s lip curled in something very like fear. “Grew up near Ainsdale Castle, the Montgomery seat. Like a pack of wolves they are. All of them. Mother, father, and the duke especially. They have the Devil in their blood. Always have. Everyone knows it who lives near Ainsdale.”
Hugh raised his eyebrow. More superstition? Or did the man truly know something? In any case Cal was no longer successfully hiding his antipathy for his employer. Should Montgomery survive the attempt on his life, Cal might not be very safe at Hermes House.
Hugh sighed and took a small purse from his pocket and slid it to the other ma
n. “Perhaps it would be best if you not return to Hermes House.”
Cartwright met his gaze across the scarred wooden table, his eyes wide with fear.
Suddenly the footman bent low over the table, nearly lying on it, his handsome face twisted into something feral. “I will go back, and I’ll tell you why: I know him like no one else does. I was a favorite of the old duchess’s and she told me a secret. A secret that could hang the Duke of Montgomery. She wrote it down and made me a witness to it and put it into an ivory box. And when that box is found he’ll hang. He’ll hang like a common sodding thief.”
For a split second Hugh merely stared, dumbfounded at the spitting footman.
Then Cartwright was up and running from the alehouse.
Hugh swore and lunged after him. “Cartwright!”
He ran up the steps and into the black evening. “Cartwright!”
He looked right and left, but all he saw was London, bustling home in the dark. Even so he shouted, “Damn it, Cartwright, what was the secret?”
Chapter Eight
For many years King Heartless ruled his kingdom with courtiers tiptoeing around him and his advisors startling if he coughed. Once he offered for the hand of a neighboring princess, but the girl cried so much when she arrived that the king sent her back home again.
All agreed she was lucky to have been spared marriage to the king without a heart.…
—From King Heartless
“Fuck your rules, Father,” the Duke of Montgomery’s voice rasped in the dark, odiferous bedchamber.
Bridget paused in the wearying task of attempting to get some sort of liquid down Val’s throat. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard the words in the last two days—by any means at all—but they were just as shocking each time.
She and Mehmed were taking turns nursing him in his rooms. They’d told the other servants that he’d decided on an Oriental course of fasting and hermitage. Mehmed said such things were sometimes done in his religion and it was just mad enough to be believable for the duke. For such a fast he was allowed only invalid foods such as beef tea, which he wanted brewed to a secret recipe. This of course had to be made by Bridget’s own hand, which she explained with many apologies to Mrs. Bram.
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